Adding Net10 Minutes

How to Buy and Add Airtime to your Net10 phone

What's the easiest and cheapest way to buy and add Net10 minutes?

You can buy Net10 refill cards at many stores or online. You can also sign up for a monthly no contract plan called Easy Minutes. And finally, you can sign up for one of the unlimited plans or other 30-day plans.

There are now two kinds of cards. You can buy the regular pay as you go cards that cost about 10 cents a minute or the monthly plans cards. The minutes from the pay as you go cards do rollover, but the minutes from the $25 750-minute cards do not rollover. In addition, you do lose your minutes when you switch from one kind to the other. Look at your airtime usage and decide which makes the most sense.

Note: Don't have a Net10 phone? Then your starting rate can be even cheaper because you can buy a Net10 phone and minutes card bundle.

Pay As You Go

Pay as you Go Cards refill your Net10 airtime balance at the rate of
about 10 cents a minute. When you activate these cards, your airtime is
added, and your service date is extended by a certain number of days.
Any airtime you already had is rolled over.

Net10 Refill Cards

Note the screenshot above is from when Net10 was offering a 100 bonus
minutes on your first three refills after buying a Net10 phone. This is
no longer offered.

You can add Net10 minutes in denominations of $20, $30, $45, $60, and $100.

200 Minute Refill Card $20

The $20 refill card gets you 200 minutes and extends your service for 30
days, or approximately one month. This card is included as a bonus on
some Net10 phone packages. It's really not worth it as a separate
purchase, because you can get 750 minutes with the $25 card which is
also extends your service for 30 days.

300 Minute Refill Card $30

The $30 refill card gets you 300 minutes and extends your service for 60 days, or approximately two months.

600 Minute Refill Card $45

The $45 refill card gets you 600 minutes but only extends your service
for 60 days or approximately two months. This brings your monthly cost
to about $22.50. Again, this is not really worth it compared to the $25 1000 -minute 30-day card.

900 Minute Refill Card $60

The $60 refill card gets your 900 minutes and is valid for 90 days or
approximately three months. This brings your monthly cost to about $20
per month.

1500 minute Refill Card $100

The 1500 minute card costs $100 and extends your service for $180 or
about six months. This brings your monthly cost to about $16.67 per
month with the minutes costing about 6.7 cents.

If you think having to keep buying these airtime cards either
in the store or online will take up too much of your time, you can set up auto-refill or sign
up for one of the . . .

30 Day Plans

There are three 30 day cards or plans, the $15, $25 and the $30 cards. Your minutes carry over with the $15 and $30 cards, but you have to refill every 30 days. They do not carry over with the $25 card, but you get many more minutes.

30 Day Refill Cards

$15 200 Minute

The $15 30 day card gives you 200 minutes which works out to 7.5 cents per minutes for airtime.

$30 500 Minute 30 Day Card

The $25 30 day card gives you 500 Net10 minutes. This works out to
about 6 cents per minute, which is pretty good, and 6 cents per
text, which is OK.

$25 1000 Minute 30 Day Card

The $25 30 day card gives you 1000 minutes which works out to 2.5 cents per minutes. However, these minutes do not carry over to the next month.

The best comparison to this is the related Straight Talk
$30 30-day plan which gives you 1500 minutes (and messages) every 30
days, but where you also get a separate 30 MB data bucket. With the Net10 $25 card, the data comes out of your main airtime bucket.

Unlimited Plans

The Unlimited plans give you unlimited talk, text and even data (except for the $35 plan) with varying amounts of high-speed data. After you use your high-speed data, you data rate is subject to being throttled down.

Unlimited Talk and Text Only?

This may be useful if you use your cell phone all day as you might for, say, business purposes. Or maybe you're just a chatterbox or constant texter.

$35 Unlimited Card

For $35 you get unlimited talk and text but no high-speed data. It's unclear whether there is any data available at all with this plan. It may only be compatible with their basic phones and not their smart phones.

Unlimited Talk, Text and Data

These cards offer unlimited talk, text and varying amounts of high speed data.

$40 Unlimited Card

You get 500 MB of high-speed data.

$50 Unlimited Card

You get 2.5 GB of high-speed data. You can get a $5 discount if you sign up for auto-refill bringing the cost down to $45.

$60 Unlimited 30 Day Card

You get 3.5 GB of high-speed data

$65 Unlimited International Card

You get 2.5 GB of high-speed data and unlimited international calling as well.

$75 Unlimited Card

You get 5 GB of high-speed data.

Old Net10 Easy Minutes Plan

The old "Easy Minutes" plans are now part of the 30 Day plan. The rates are the same, but it appears that Auto-refill is now an option rather than a requirement.

Net10 airtime bundles

It's unclear whether you can still add additional airtime bundles in quantities of $5.00 for 50 minutes,
$10 for 100 minutes and $15 for 150 minutes as before. These minute bundles were available as one-time purchases and would not change your monthly plan.

Net10 Airtime on Demand

Of course if you're willing to just give up your credit card info and
just press a few measly buttons every couple of months then you could
instead sign up for Net10 Airtime on Demand. Then when you're either
running low on minutes or your service is about to expire, you can buy
airtime straight from your phone. Sign up here to buy Net10 minutes directly from your phone.

Cancel If You Lose Your Phone

Just make sure to cancel this if your phone gets lost or stolen. You don't want to buy minutes for someone you don't know.

Summary

Customer satisfaction has been great, and though they've introduced some new plans, that will hopefully continue to be true.

Thanks for reading this Net10 Minutes review.

Your Questions and Comments

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Stores don't carry $15 30 day cardWhere can I find the $15 30 day card. No stores have them. The 150 minutes is even more than I need. Can I buy on line?
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Hi Nick, …

Adding Service DaysI still have 46000 minutes but no service days. Can I buy service days only.
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No, I don't believe that NET10 has a card you can …

Adding days not minutesWhy can't I add more days without so many unneeded minutes to my net10 phone? Tracfone offers 90 days with only 60 minutes for $19.95
Why doesn't NET10 …

Disappointed about 200 minutesI was able until recently to purchase 200 prepaid minutes for my Net10 phone. Now it seems I have to buy 300 minutes, which I don't need nor want, since …

Can't order minutes without emailI am not good on the computer, and I do not have an e-mail so I cannot order minutes for my phone.
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Hi,
You can still buy airtime …

Older Net10 card found Not rated yetI found a 'net10 adds 300 minutes' card in a drawer. how can I check to see if it has been used? I have uploaded front and back sides of this older card. …

Why do i have NO SERVICE right now? Not rated yetI can't text or make calls. I get a response that states something about not a registered network, however when I go to networks, it shows that I'm connected. …

$30 phone card Invalid Not rated yetI purchased a $30 phone card to apply to my phone but is telling me airtime pin is invalid for my phone. How do I apply it to my phone?
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Pay as you go for LGL16C? Not rated yetWill the $30 pay as you go airtime card work with this phone?
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Sorry you cannot. You have to use it with one of the monthly plans which start …

Service card from store. Not rated yetI bought a $35 refill card at a store today. What do I do or where do I go online to add this card?
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Hi Amanda,
You have a couple …

Saving easy minutes Not rated yetMy phone deactivated on easy minutes and when I reactivated it I lost my 3000 minutes I had
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Hi,
I'm not sure what you mean by …

Is there a re-activation fee? Not rated yetI have a phone that I always used on the $50.00 unlimited plan. the phone and service have not been used for approximately 3 months. I now want to use …

Problem with Easy Minutes and LG 300 Not rated yetJust a quick note. It was the last day of the service period of an LG 300g phone . I added an "easy minutes" plan to a phone instead of adding a standard …

Phones

Misc.

Policies

Related Pages

As Net10 has both monthly plans and prepaid plans with rollover minutes, you might be interested in the related brands, Straight Talk and Tracfone.

Since Tracfone is all about the airtime and, er, tracking it, it turns out there are a few pages (sorry about that) on this site about it. You can find out more about how to add airtime or figure out just how many minutes you're going to get.

Straight Talk has both an unlimited plan as well as a monthly plan with a limited number of minutes, texts and data. In that case, you may want to know how to check your balance.

The Gophone system in contrast tends to display the actual dollar value of your airtime rather than the minutes. However it's displayed, eventually you have to refill your airtime.